Welcome back!
Sign in to start taking action.

Thanks for signing up as a global citizen. In order to create your account we need you to provide your email address. You can check out our Privacy Policy to see how we safeguard and use the information you provide us with. If your Facebook account does not have an attached e-mail address, you'll need to add that before you can sign up.

Iceland Starts 2018 in Style by Making Gender Pay Gap Illegal

Iceland plans to end the gender pay gap by 2022.

It’s 2018, and Iceland is taking its New Year’s Resolution very seriously.

On Monday, Jan. 1, Iceland became the first country to officially codify equal pay for men and women — taking a major step toward closing the gender pay gap. The new law will require government offices and private businesses greater than 25 people to obtain a government certificate stating that they carry out equal pay policies, or else risk being fined or audited, BBC reported.

According to the BBC, the law will extend not only to equal pay for women, but also to all individuals regardless of “race, religion, disability, occupational disability, age, and sexual orientation.”

"Women have been talking about this for decades and I really feel that we have managed to raise awareness, and we have managed to get to the point that people realise that the legislation we have had in place is not working, and we need to do something more,” Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind, who is on the board of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association, told Al Jazeera.

Since 2006, when Iceland began to record gender wage gap statistics, the country has managed to close the gap by about 10%, according to Al Jazeera.

Iceland is now the only country in the world to make equal pay for men and women compulsory, according to IB Times.

Other countries have, however, instituted laws aimed at reducing the gender pay gap. Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal all require “pay data reporting,” wherein employers are required to send gender data to the government, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank. France and Sweden require employers to review their pay practices each year, and in Luxembourg, companies greater than 15 people are required to employ an “equality delegate” to oversee gender equality policies in the workplace.